Another boring philosophy lesson: Abortion

Right now, I am in the middle of furnishing my apartment. I always knew that there would be lots of little things I took for granted living either at my parents’ house or in campus-run housing, and now that I am without their aid, I see that I was right. It’s amazing how many small things I am finding that I am lacking that I never before had to worry about. In fact, I’m going shopping now more frequently than I ever have before in my life.

While I was out shopping today (I was looking for some scented candles to match the accent colors in the living room), I saw a woman wearing a T-shirt commemorating Operation Rescue in Wichita, Kansas, in 1993. For those of you who might not know, Operation Rescue was a massive protest in the form of civil-disobedience against Wichita’s abortion clinics. Protesters blocked clinic doors, kept patients and doctors from entering the facilities, blew up a few trash dumpsters, and laid down in the middle of busy highways bringing traffic to a halt all over Wichita. Generally, the protesters made pests of themselves, as I understand from people who lived in Wichita at the time.

What struck me is that by and large, people who are quite passionate about the issue of abortion are almost, to the last person, completely unsophisticated about their views, do not understand the conceptual weaknesses of their positions, and find themselves unable to do more than repeat particular talking points that they’ve gotten off a pamphlet another unsophisticated person prepared.

In case one didn’t know it, there is a voluminous literature in philosophical journals on Ethics over the morality of abortion. One of the most (in)famous philosophers on the issue of abortion actually teaches at the University of Kansas (Professor Donald Marquis). And virtually every single philosopher has outright dismissed the standard two positions concerning abortion for the same reason: they are quite untenable in any sort of principled fashion.

The two classic positions can be characterized something like this:

1) Person A says that abortion is wrong because it is murder. They point out that the fetus is a human being and that all human beings deserve a right to life. Abortion is therefore no different, morally, than killing a fully grown human being.

2) Person B says that abortion is permissible because it is a woman’s right to choose. A woman, this person says, should have the right to decide whether to have children, when to have them, and how many to have. The woman’s right to decide what to do with her body is the kind of freedom we all need to live in society, so abortion cannot be restricted.

Neither position is tenable in any rational way.

The classic pro-life person makes several mistakes. First, most usually, they draw their moral principles on killing from the Bible. While this is not a fatal mistake for a theory on the wrongness of killing, it suffers from two separate critiques. The first critique is that the Bible may have some good nuggets of wisdom in it, but by and large, it is not a very good guide for morality. If you doubt my words, let me remind you that the Bible contains exact rules on whom you may rightfully enslave, how to go about selling human beings as property, that handicapped people may not enter heaven, vivid descriptions of deity-mandated genocide, and recommends stoning for children who talk back to their parents or for people who work on Sunday.

The second critique is the problem of trying to get out of the bible the moral principle that killing a fetus is wrong. While it is true that God issues one of his ten (well, one of the second set of 10 commandments... The first set involves not boiling goats in the milk of the she-goat which bore the one you eat) commandments as a prohibition on killing, this does not have the forceful significance one might hope. God commands others to kill repeatedly, and kills many individuals himself in terrible ways.

One might not even be able to say that God treasures infant life more than other forms. Even the innocent babies are not spared. God makes it clear in his orders to the Israelites during their genocides to wipe out the elderly and the suckling babe alike and to spare none (except for the virgin women, of course, which become property of the invading Israelites). God curses all infants in Genesis, dooming them to toil or pain of childbirth. God drowns millions of infants in the flood in Genesis. In the Old Testament (I’m too lazy to look it up right now), God even kills an infant baby as punishment for the adultery of the father King David with the wife of one of his generals.

A second main problem with the standard pro-life argument, leaving aside the biblical origin for most adherents of the position, is that the term ‘human’ is nebulous and uncertain. On the one hand, ‘human’ can be said to be as the Supreme Court defined pornography: "I know it when I see it." But what we mean by ‘human’ will depend on whether we include fetuses or not in the moral community, and the pro-lifer rarely stops to analyze the difficulty with their assumed definition.

One can define human in three ways. First, one can define ‘human’ in a spiritual way, identifying humans as things that have souls. Of course, this poses unique problems. It was not a century ago when ‘the woman’ question was vigorously argued in the most progressive of universities, and seminars were held to discuss whether women had souls. For the longest time, black people were not believed to have souls, either. Clearly, identifying which things in the world have souls is not something which we can clearly work through. Furthermore, identifying ensouled beings seems to be a circular. Those whom we wish to be ensouled are used as the definition of what it means to have a soul.

Humanity can be defined psychologically. Being human is identified with a particular set of mental characteristics which make one human. Some theorists will lay out sets of mental characteristics, but I will not do that here. The classic hypothetical which is used to demonstrate the identification of a person with their mind is the brain-swap. You have two people, say George W. Bush and John Kerry, and they undergo an operation to have their brains transplanted with each other. When the operation is finished, where is George W. Bush? Is George W. still in his body or is he now in John Kerry’s body? The person who identifies a person with their mind, will agree that human followed his brain, and did not remain with his (old) body.

Finally, humanity can be identified biologically. A human is a particular set of DNA, something that looks like a human, something that has ‘human’ parts, or (to get a bit more technical), a physical contiguity of something which was human at one point.

Depending on which version of humanity you hold to, you will come down differently on particular issues. The recent controversy over the death of Terri Schiavo in Florida illustrates this concept. When someone is fully brain-dead (as all her doctors asserted), what you have left is a body with autonomic nerve function. Before they pulled the feeding tube, was Terri alive? If you are a biological humanist, then yes, Terri was still alive. Her heart was beating, she was breathing, and she digested food. If you are a psychological humanist, then no. Terri died when she went brain-dead.

Classic pro-lifers are biological humanists, hence the popular phrase "Abortion stops a beating heart." The fetus has human DNA, therefore, it is a human being. The fetus has human features, therefore it is a human being. The fetus is potentially a human, therefore it is a human being. Unfortunately, there are several really terrible problems (I believe fatal problems) for biological humanism. First, there is the mind-swap problem discussed above. In this modern age, it seems clear that your brain is identical with your mind. A biological humanist, to maintain that the human doesn’t follow his brain, must maintain that the brain and mind are separable. This seems unlikely. Also, there are two separate problems that I want to flesh out to demonstrate the fallacy of biological humanism:

First problem: Suppose I have cancer. I go to the oncologist and have the oncologist remove a cancer cell culture from my body. As usually done with such cultures, the doctor places it in a Petri dish and adds nutrient agar. By watching the growth of the cells in the culture dish, he can tell whether the cancer is malignant or benign. But now, having found that the cell-culture is benign, what should he do with the cancer cell culture in the dish? It decidedly has human DNA. It is surely a physical continuation of something which was human. It ought to have a right to life, then. But we feel no guilt when we throw it into the bin marked for incineration.

Second problem: Suppose I am out in my backyard having a barbecue. An alien saucer lands by the pool and a little green fellow gets out. After flipping on his translation device, he tells me of his planet. He tells me about his form of government, the scientific advances they have made, and shows me pictures of the new house he just had built, and pictures of his wife and children too. Can I permissibly kill the alien? Surely not. The alien is not human by any means. The alien does not have any human DNA. In fact, the alien may not even use DNA as a method of heredity.

By assuming the position of biological humanism, classic pro-lifers have opened themselves up for some serious conceptual flaws. Finally, classic pro-lifers suffer from one additional problem. This problem was illustrated by Judith Jarvis Thomson’s article on abortion, where she likened pregnancy to a peculiar scenario.

Dr. Thomson’s argument goes like this: You are jogging in the park one afternoon, when some masked people jump out of the bushes and press a camphor-soaked rag to your face. When you wake up, you find yourself lying in a hospital bed attached to a bizarre machine. Lying in a bed just across the room from you (also connected to the machine) is another person. A nurse comes in and tells you that you were kidnapped by members of the Society of Music Lovers, and brought here to this hospital. The person lying across the room from you is a famous violinist who has a rare blood disease. The machine hooked up to the two of you will allow your liver to filter out toxins from his blood, and will ensure that he lives for the nine months it will take to cure him of his disease. He is a person and has a right to life. Even though you did not ask for this situation, the nurse is sorry, but she cannot unhook you, because to do so would kill the violinist (a violation of his right to life). Thomson would allow you to unhook yourself from the machine, even knowing that this would cause the death of the violinist.

Thomson’s point is that the mere fact that we give something a right to life does not entail that it is always wrong to kill that being. Thomson argues that other considerations should be weighed against the right to life to discover what to do.

Pro-lifers of the classic variety will not have any considerations like those just mentioned in mind. They will almost universally parrot the same tired lines about "It is always wrong to take a human life" despite the fact that such sayings cannot be supported with principles that stand up to scrutiny.

Unfortunately, classic pro-choicers are almost as bad.

Pro-choicers will typically be found repeating something along the lines of "A woman’s right to choose what happens to her own body is what matters." While such a sentiment sounds good on its face, it suffers from the same flaw as the pro-life argument - namely, that it assumes the moral status of the fetus without arguing for the position.

My rights to my body are not absolute by any means. People do not have an absolute property right in their own bodies. Our society certainly does not hold such a view currently and one might be hard pressed to defend such an absolute right to property in one’s person.
My rights to my person are effective only within the bounds of law, and only to the extent that they do not interfere with other moral agents. As one undergraduate professor of mine once noted, "your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins."

We do not allow people to take their own lives, or to sell their kidneys for money. We do not allow people to take dangerous chemical substances (well, many dangerous chemical substances, anyway). If a mother with a small child wants to simply get up one morning and move to another State, she cannot simply leave the baby at her old house when she leaves (such an act would likely be criminal).

The only way that the ‘woman’s right to choose’ argument can function is if we accept from the start that the fetus is not a moral agent. This is denied vehemently by the biological humanists, of course, since the fetus is biologically a human being. Pro-choicers are usually psychological humanists though. Killing the fetus is not a moral wrong because the fetus is not yet a human (i.e., does not yet have mental characteristics sufficient to grant it personhood).

Such a view seems plausible to me for other reasons, but suffers from a few conceptual flaws, just as does its pro-life cousin. Demanding a particular set of mental characteristics to create a moral agent has some unforseen consequences.

While it is true that a fetus does not have the mental characteristics to make it a human (it cannot, after all, have them since its mind has not yet even developed), such characteristics are also not likely to be found in a newborn infant. Holding that the fetus may be aborted because it is not yet human also demands that infanticide be acceptable until some developmental threshold is passed. Such a conclusion is shocking to the minds of most people.

As well, what of sleeping people? Particularly during non-dream sleep, while I sleep, my mind may be functioning, but certainly not on any level sufficient to make me a moral agent. I am, for all intents and purposes, unconscious. That word might be glossed over, so read it again... ‘Unconscious’ ...not even cognizant of my own existence. Such a mental state is surely the most base mental state one could imagine and still purport for there to be a ‘mental realm’ to a creature exhibiting it. What of the senile elderly? What of the mentally handicapped?

Defining the proper set of mental characteristics is difficult and may be clouded by circularity problems. A theorist must come up with the appropriate set of characteristics without thinking through the consequences of his set, otherwise he might alter his proposed set of mental faculties to allow in those he wishes or keep out those he does not want in the ‘human’ group.

Finally, if we are willing to accept some set of psychological principles which will allow most infants to remain on the ‘human’ side of the line (meaning we can’t kill them), then by what principle can we possibly exclude the millions and millions of non-human animals who have mental faculties well in excess of newborn human infants? Gorillas have been found to have intelligence levels of young humans and chimpanzees are in the same range. Dogs and cats have mental abilities, ranging from memory to planning to rudimentary mathematical abilities, which far outstrip our own young. Even ravens have been found to possess mental acuity greater than kindergarten students.

There are more sophisticated positions available to people, should they care to think about the matters carefully. While I have yet to come across an account of the wrongness of killing which did not suffer from some critique or another, it strikes me as a sign of intellectual weakness on the part of American education that the two MOST flawed theories are also the most popular.